Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

Tag Archives: Natural Rights

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, April 2, 2018:

The completely unplanned, unstaged, unfunded, and spontaneous gathering of 75 students outside Rockledge High School in Brevard County, Florida, last Friday morning was almost completely ignored by the mainstream media. Organized by Chloe Deaton, a sophomore, and Anna Delaney, a junior, the event lasted 20 minutes, just long enough to make their point: Other students in the same high school and around the country who urged more infringements on the people’s right to keep and bear arms didn’t speak for them.

After playing the national anthem (no one kneeled) and “God Bless America” on loudspeakers set up on the school’s track, Delaney told her classmates, “We were built on certain rights and that was one of the original rights, that we should have the right to bear arms.” She can be forgiven for failing to note that the right to self-defense and, thereby, the access to tools useful for self-defense are natural rights and pre-date the Constitution.

She made up for her misstatement by quoting President Ronald Reagan, who got it right:

In announcing Australia’s new federal gun amnesty program, Justice Minister Michael Keenan told the Sunday Mail last week: “This is the first Australia-wide gun amnesty program since 1996, when the Howard government took action following the devastation of the Port Arthur Massacre.” (above: fountain in Port Arthur) The massacre of 35 people and the wounding of another 23 in late April, 1996 at the popular tourist site in southeastern Australia served as the excuse to implement the country’s National Firearms Agreement (NFA). The NFA turned millions of law-abiding gun owners into criminals with its heavy restrictions, and the amnesty program was designed to remove the now-illegal weaponry from their rightful owners with a mixture of carrot and stick.

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, March 13, 2017:

Location of Port Arthur, where the majority of the shootings occurred

A series of referendums from 1898 to 1900 led to the ratification of Australia’s constitution, which became effective on January 1, 1901. Unfortunately, the idea of adding a Bill of Rights similar to those contained in the United States Constitution was voted down, with the majority holding that the traditional rights of British subjects were sufficient to keep the national government in check. Some rights are included, including the right to trial by jury, the right to just compensation for government’s “acquisition” of private property, the freedom of religion, the freedom of “political” communication, and the right to vote. Missing are explicit guarantees of the freedom of association, the freedom of assembly, and the Second Amendment.

Also missing from the country is the National Rifle Association or anything like the “gun” culture present in the United States.

That’s why, following the ghastly atrocity known as the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996, it was fairly easy for the national government to pass the

I heard Robert Higgs speak at a Cato conference in California a few years ago and found him winsome, humble and bright. His resume is remarkable: Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute, Editor of The Independent Review, senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He’s best known for his tour de force, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, which was first published in 1987 and was just republished a few months ago.

He has been inveighing against big government for decades and, happily, has condensed his methods of resistance into a short article,

Those who have not read any critiques of Abraham Lincoln will be at a loss to understand why the 16th president would need to be vindicated in the first place. Upon investigating the matter further, however, the reader may come to the place of Benjamin Franklin, who wrote:

Having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.

And so the first thing Professor Krannawitter does is dip into the increasingly large well of those critiques first, to explore the charges at length, and then attempt to respond in Lincoln’s favor.

This, according to Krannawitter, isn’t just an intellectual exercise:

When critics attempt to knock Lincoln out of the pantheon of American heroes, they add to the growing cynicism of American politics. After all, if Americans come to believe that the president reputed to be the greatest was in truth a scoundrel unworthy of respect, then surely they will view all lesser politicians as such, adding to the mistaken idea that there is nothing noble or beautiful about politics…

His opening chapter serves to illustrate the enormous difficulty Krannawitter faces in

In his article in London’s Financial Times, professor Jeffrey Sachslaments the inevitable shrinkage in America’s federal government, regardless of which political party takes the White House in November. Calling the national elections “a full-throated ideological brawl…the small-government agenda has already prevailed. No matter who is elected on November 6, dangerous cuts in public goods and services are already in train.”

Sachs’ point of view is that government is the central provider of goods and services, especially for those who can’t afford them. According to Sachs,

Mr. Ryan’s budget plan…would…slash transfer programs for the poor, such as Medicaid and food stamps…[and] would also eliminate Mr. Obama’s healthcare legislation.

[This is] Radical stuff.

But the Obama administration, if it is returned to power, would be no different, he says. Obama “has also already accepted a brutal shrinkage of government programs in coming years. The similarities of the Obama budget and Mr. Ryan’s are striking.” For instance:

Niall Ferguson, professor at Harvard and the London School of Economics, summarized his latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest for Newsweek magazine’s The Daily Beast by stating that he is not a “declinist” but is instead expecting an imminent collapse of the United States. He wrote: “I really don’t believe the United States…is in some kind of gradual, inexorable decline…. …in my view, civilizations don’t rise…and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons…. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.”

As evidence Ferguson points to the lost city of the Incas, Machu Picchu, which was built over a hundred years and collapsed in less than ten. He notes that the Roman Empire collapsed in just a few decades in the early fifth century, while the Ming dynasty ended with frightening speed in the mid-17th century.

He tries to explain why the West, and especially and specifically the United States, is set up for a similar collapse through the use of

Sharron Angle is going to have to learn how to fight with both hands in Nevada’s general election battle against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, as Manu Raju explains in two articles appearing at Politico.com here and here. With her left hand she will be busy fending off attack ads from the Reid camp for her “extremism,” and with her right hand soothing sitting Senators with whom she might well be working after the election.